If you're an indie retailer, you know the struggles we face - competition, costs, and playing field slanted against us. The goal of this blog is to slant the field a little bit back in our direction.

Saturday, December 3, 2011

Statistics Falsified for Your Benefit

I love December!

The statistical anomalies are so much fun.

Most businesses look at their sales in comparison to last year. And most businesses compare Thursdays to Thursdays, Fridays to Fridays, etc. This comparison works great right up until December 1st.

As you know, you only get 24 days in December prior to Christmas. Those 24 days are extremely important. So you might be tempted to compare December 1st to December 1st for this month to see how you are doing instead of Thursday to Thursday.

Just to show you how misleading those numbers might be...

If I compare day to day for Thursday 12/1 and Friday 12/2 to the correlating Thursday & Friday from last year (12/2/10 and 12/3/10), my sales aredown 21%.

But if I compare those same days this year to 12/1 and 12/2 from last year, we are up 11%.

Being an optimist, I'm going with up. Two days down, twenty-two to go.

Keep smiling and keep making memories. Those are the numbers that really count.

PS No, there really isn't a lesson in this post, unless you want to take away from it that the most important thing is to keep a positive spin on everything this time of year. There will be time to evaluate how you really did when the season is over.